Elana Hagler

Elana Hagler did not set out to design coins. She set out to paint.

She was born in Tel Aviv and came to the United States at the age of five. At Brandeis University she started in neuroscience and psychology — the safe, sensible path — before adding a fine-art major partway through. The turning point came the summer before her senior year. A grant sent her to Italy, where she fell in with a circle of European painters who, in her telling, set her on the road to becoming an observational painter: someone who draws the world by looking hard at it, not by inventing it.

She chose art over science. Then she chased the training relentlessly. She studied at the Jerusalem Studio School's intensive Master Class and in the hills of Umbria, learned from figurative painters Lennart Anderson and Israel Hershberg, and earned her Master of Fine Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia — the oldest art school and museum in the country. For fourteen years she taught painting and drawing, eventually as a professor of art at Alabama State University.

A coin was never the goal. It became, almost by accident, the place her looking would reach the most eyes.

Hagler is a representational painter — she paints people, objects, and landscapes that read plainly as what they are. Portraits, figures, still lifes, the land. Her work is built on what she calls rigorous observation, the discipline of rendering exactly what the eye sees, deepened by a lifetime spent inside art history.

That discipline is what makes her coins unusual. A coin is the hardest still life there is. The artist gets a circle a few centimeters across and a relief — the shallow depth the design rises off the metal surface — measured in fractions of a millimeter. There is no color to lean on, only light catching raised metal. A painter who can make a brushstroke describe form is exactly the kind of artist who can make that sliver of relief do the same work.

In 2019, after a six-month application, Hagler was accepted into the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the Mint's roster of outside artists who design coins and medals alongside its in-house sculptor-engravers. She was one of 27 chosen from a national pool. On a Mint coin the labor is split: the designer draws the concept, and a Mint sculptor-engraver translates the drawing into the three-dimensional model the dies are cut from. The dies are the hardened steel stamps that strike the image into each blank. Hagler's name belongs to the drawing — the idea, the composition, the choice of what Liberty should even look like.

For the 2023 American Liberty High Relief Gold Coin, the Mint asked its artists to imagine Liberty again. Hagler's answer was not a woman, not an eagle, not a flag. It was a tree.

She drew a bristlecone pine — the gnarled, half-dead, impossibly old conifer that grows where almost nothing else will, high on the dry mountains of California, Nevada, and Utah. Some bristlecones are reckoned to be among the oldest living organisms on Earth, lasting as long as 5,000 years. The Mint described the symbolism plainly: the bristlecone endures the harshest ground, and is often the first living thing to return after a catastrophe — a lava flow, a glacier's retreat. Liberty, in Hagler's hands, is the thing that survives and comes back. Chief Engraver Joe Menna sculpted her design; the reverse — the tails side — carries a young bald eagle on a rocky outcrop, designed and sculpted by Mint medallic artist John McGraw.

The coin is struck in one ounce of 24-karat, .9999 fine gold, with a face value of $100. It is a "high relief" coin, meaning the design stands unusually far off the surface — the Mint reserves the technique for its showpieces, because it takes extra striking pressure and care to bring up.

Then came the verdict. In August 2024, at the American Numismatic Association's World's Fair of Money in Chicago, Krause Publications' Coin of the Year competition — the closest thing world numismatics has to an Academy Award — gave the coin its Best Gold Coin honor and its overall grand title: Coin of the Year. A painter's drawing of an old tree had beaten every other coin issued that year, anywhere on Earth.